相关论文: Statistical Mechanics of Ecological Systems: Neutr…
Over fifty years ago, Robert May applied random matrix theory to show that as ecological systems grow in size, stability decreases. What emerged from this and the critique that followed was decades of what has been called the…
The Semantic Theory of Evolution (STE) takes the existence of a number of arbitrary communication codes as a fundamental feature of life, from the genetic code to human cultural communication codes. Their arbitrariness enables, at each…
Several authors have hypothesized that ecological systems are subject to thermodynamic optimization, which, if proven correct, could represent a long sought general principle of organization in ecology. Although there have been recent…
We study nonequilibrium properties of small and chaotic quantum systems, i.e., non-integrable systems whose size is small in the sense that the separations of energy levels are non-negligible as compared with other relevant energy scales.…
A new theoretical approach to non-equilibrium statistical systems has recently been proposed by the author, a co-author and others. It is based on a variational principle which is associated with the discrepancy of a path through…
Statistical thermodynamics is valuable as a conceptual structure that shapes our thinking about equilibrium thermodynamic states. A cloud of unresolved questions surrounding the foundations of the theory could lead an impartial observer to…
In this paper we review various information-theoretic characterizations of the approach to equilibrium in biological systems. The replicator equation, evolutionary game theory, Markov processes and chemical reaction networks all describe…
There has been a long-standing and at times fractious debate whether complex and large systems can be stable. In ecology, the so-called `diversity-stability debate' arose because mathematical analyses of ecosystem stability were either…
This paper is an introduction to the von Neumann entropy in a historic approach. Von Neumann's gedanken experiment is repeated, which led him to the formula of thermodynamic entropy of a statistical operator. In the analysis of his ideas we…
Our understanding of the evolutionary process has gone a long way since the publication, 150 years ago, of "On the origin of species" by Charles R. Darwin. The XXth Century witnessed great efforts to embrace replication, mutation, and…
Ecological patterns arise from the interplay of many different processes, and yet the emergence of consistent phenomena across a diverse range of ecological systems suggests that many patterns may in part be determined by statistical or…
The Shannon entropy, one of the cornerstones of information theory, is widely used in physics, particularly in statistical mechanics. Yet its characterization and connection to physics remain vague, leaving ample room for misconceptions and…
The statistical mechanics of Gibbs is a juxtaposition of subjective, probabilistic ideas on the one hand and objective, mechanical ideas on the other. In this paper, we follow the path set out by Jaynes, including elements added…
The problem of the insensitivity of the macroscopic behavior of any thermodynamical system to partitioning generates a bias between the reproducibility of its macroscopic behavior viewed as the simplest form of causality and its long-term…
In 1985, Edward Nelson, who formulated the theory of stochastic mechanics, made an interesting remark on Bell's theorem. Nelson analysed the latter in the light of classical fields that behave randomly. He found that if a stochastic hidden…
The notion of group entropy is proposed. It enables to unify and generalize many different definitions of entropy known in the literature, as those of Boltzmann-Gibbs, Tsallis, Abe and Kaniadakis. Other new entropic functionals are…
The sciences of complexity present some recurrent themes: the emergence of qualitatively new behaviors in dissipative systems out of equilibrium, the aparent tendency of complex system to lie at the border of phase transitions and…
Preserving biodiversity and ecosystem stability is a challenge that can be pursued through modern statistical mechanics modeling. Here we introduce a variational maximum entropy-based algorithm to evaluate the entropy in a minimal ecosystem…
Empirical studies of graphs have contributed enormously to our understanding of complex systems. Known today as network science, what was originally a theoretical study of graphs has grown into a more scientific exploration of communities…
Entropy is a very useful concept from physics that tries to explain how a system behaves from a point of view of the thermodynamics. However, there are two ways to explain entropy, and it depends on if we are studying a microsystem or a…